We Design Handbags

For handbag designer Adrien Lucas of Tuff Betty Bags, a high school hobby of collecting vintage handbags has now turned into a career of designing and creating handbags for others which she sells through her website www.TuffBettyBags.com as well as through some stores and advertising in magazines.

Adrien, who has been making her own bags for years, started creating bags commercially in 1999. “I have been collecting handbags for years, since high school,” she says, “I had a bag that had a really cool handle but the body was shot. I took the bag apart and realized that they weren’t so mysterious after all. So I began making them.”

Adrien now makes about 50 handbags a year and says that she gets her inspiration for these handbags through “people watching, music, vintage fashion, architecture or simply finding a piece of material or jewelry” that she wants to translate into a handbag. She also describes herself as a “John Galliano nut” and says, “I love his crazy designs.”

She describes the style of her handbags as ranging “from elegant with obsessive detail in beading and embroidery with visuals relating to nature to very rock-and-roll humorous carryables for the eternal party girl.” And her most unique piece, according to her, was probably her Regal Fields or Liquid Paisley.

Apart from making bags herself Adrien is also instrumental in encouraging others to do the same and has been on HGTV’s Crafting Coast to Coast which showed her making a souvenir travel tote (instructions may be found at http://tuffbettybags.com/pressapril05.htm) and she also creates DIY wristlets kits which have been featured in Bust and Venus magazines. “The kit comes with instructions and everything you need aside from a sewing machine to make the bag,” she says.

As for her own tools she uses (or wishes to use) in creating her bags she says “I have an ancient Pfaff I use for heavier material and a sturdy old Kenmore. I own a heat transfer press. I wish I had a Husquverna sewing machine so I could program some of the embroidery into a digital sewing machine. I wish I had an enormous printer for printing out larger images for my heat transfer press.”

Although Adrien does not belong to any clubs in her home town of Sarasota she does network quite broadly over the Internet. “I link via the Internet to many different handbag designers and other designers,” she says, “This has helped greatly in producing good web traffic and additional sales from people finding me through other sites.”

Adrien brings “the ability to carry on” to her business. “I just haven’t burnt out,” she told us, “and feel as if the momentum for designing handbags that are interesting to me grows stronger each year. It is difficult to be completely unique in this day and age, especially when it seems everyone is making handbags. What I bring to the handbag table is a perspective that has been infused by wonderful influences. What I mean by that is I take everything I have learned, from cross-hatching taught to me by my art professor father to embroidery skills taught to me by my aunt to sewing construction taught to me by my mother, along with everything else I learned along the way and draw from that to keep cranking out fun designs.”

Her technique has also improved. “It’s funny,” she says, “You begin to incorporate stuff that reflects what is occurring in the world. For instance, cell phone pockets, pockets to keep your Palm or Blackberry for everyday carryables. Also my knowledge of embroidery has grown so much and there is always room for learning new stitches.”

In concluding Adrien would like to offer the following advice to people getting started in creating handbags: “Trademark your company name, that is worth every penny. Surf the internet and really explore how vast the handbag world is. There are so many of us creating carryables and it’s interesting and exciting to see other designer’s work. If starting on a smaller scale (like me) consider donating bags to your local charity to create local buzz and to support something you believe in.”